The Creator fashioned men from mud while distracting the jaguar with a leaking calabash to fetch water. Despite the jaguar’s efforts, the Creator completed thirteen men and twelve guns. When the jaguar demanded the dog as prey, the Creator demonstrated man’s superiority using the guns. After being wounded twice, the jaguar learned to respect humans and dogs, retreating to live in the bush.
Source
Ethnology of the Mayas of
Southern and Central British Honduras
by John Eric Thompson
Field Museum of Natural History
Anthropological Series, Pub.274, Vol.17.2
Chicago, 1930
► Themes of the story
Creation: The narrative explains how humans were created from mud by the Creator.
Trickster: The Creator uses cunning by giving the jaguar a leaking calabash, distracting him during the creation of humans.
Conflict with Nature: The story depicts a confrontation between humans (and their creations) and the jaguar, a powerful natural predator.
► From the same Region or People
The Creator decided to make men, for the jaguar already existed. He took mud and started to fashion men, but the jaguar was watching, and he did not wish him to see how man was made.
Therefore he sent him to the river to fetch some water, giving him a jar and a calabash with holes in it to scoop the water out of the river. In this way he hoped to have time to make the men, while the jaguar was vainly endeavoring to fill the jar with the leaking calabash. The jaguar tried and tried to fill the jar, but did not succeed. Then the frog called out to him, “Chohac, Chohac, Chohac! Put mud over the holes.”
► Continue reading…
The jaguar did so, but by the time he had filled the jar and taken it back, the Creator had already made thirteen men of mud and twelve guns. As the jaguar came up, he saw that the Creator was making a dog too out of mud.
“That animal is going to be for me to eat,” he said.
“No,” said the Creator. “The dog is to be the servant of man and these guns, further, will teach you to respect him.”
“I am not afraid of the gun,” replied the jaguar. “I’ll catch the shots that are fired at me.”
“All right, let’s see,” said the Creator, and he made the jaguar stand some way away, and then one of the newly created men fired at him, wounding him in the paw. The man bandaged up the wound. Again the jaguar said, “The dog is for me.”
But man said, “No,” and sent the dog after the jaguar and drove it up into a tree, and again shot him in the paw. “Now you have learned your lesson that you must not eat man or dog. The other animals you can eat. Go away and live in the bush.”
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